Person of Interest

From reading the comments, I think a lot of people haven’t seen the show. I highly recommend it. However, you have to remember that this aired on CBS in the age of shows like CSI and NCIS. Therefore, it was made into a high-episode-number, cookie cutter serial crime drama. Every episode follows a similar pattern where the two main characters are trying to prevent a murder. However… if you can make it past that and especially stay focused thru two seasons of that - you will be massively rewarded. The later seasons especially are essentially a fantastic, complex, hard sci-fi show about proxy wars between AGIs using human agents in a battle of control. It’s honestly one of the best shows ever and way ahead of its time

AI surveillance is here but the next and more terrifying step towards population control is not surveillance but direct elimination of rebels via killer drones (distant and short-range) like in Minority Report. "Spyders" but with a killer taser or something

First they control you, and if you try to raise against them, you're erased

I often think about Person of Interest, and when I clicked on the post, I expected to be presented with something else entirely, as the show is now 15 years old. What a pleasant surprise!

I like to compare how similar or different The Machine is to current state-of-the-art LLMs. Interestingly, in this fiction, The Machine's preferred way of communicating doesn't seem to be through text, or even artificial speech. It can see almost everything, and seems capable of improving itself, but it feels "intelligent" in a way that humans or LLMs aren't. Maybe the writers thought that giving it the ability to write text or speak directly would make it "less" in many ways (less mysterious, less machine-like, less intelligent, etc.). It also gives the impression that you cannot really guess what it "thinks" or fully understand it.

I'm also realizing that most of the time, characters don't really have a "conversation" with The Machine, whereas it is a core feature of current-day LLMs. And The Machine doesn't even "create" its communication channels, it uses existing ones (phone booth, radio ...).

It just so happens that I started rewatching it since about 2 months ago and I am regularly surprised at how well a lot of situations and questions this show contains applies to the current state of AI and mass surveillance. The show does not feel dated at all.

Pleasantly surprised to see this here. One of the most memorable shows that I watched ages ago. It was strong at the beginning but kind of dragged on in later seasons. Still very nice to binge.

In case you’re looking for some more shows related to AI, Cupertino by Robert King and Michelle King is currently airing and is pretty entertaining.

The primary science fiction quality of the show is that something like that could have been done as early as it was said to have been. At the time, that part of it seemed almost completely impossible. With subsequent developments, it now only seems implausible. Wild.

Great show and "If-Then-Else"[1] is one of the greatest single episodes of any show ever. Like watching the X-Files today, I would recommend skipping a lot of the one-off episodes. Here's a list someone put together.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonOfInterest/wiki/index/

[1] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4128194/?_ssoLoop=1

I absolutely loved this show, and to be honest a rewatch is needed. I won’t make any reference to specifics due to spoilers. Would recommend.

POI is a great show also because of the two main characters, the geek and his execution-man, both accomplished actors.

One of my most fav TV Serials to have come out of the West.

I've been re-watching Person of Interest intermittently over the summer and also intended to post about the show's surprising prescience. Much as I love the show, it could use a fan edit to cut out the acres of NCIS-style case-of-the-week that plagues the first two seasons, to bring it into a Mr.Robot-style mini-series.

So yes, you really do have to slog through nearly 50 templated 'cases' before the backstory really sets in, and Michael Emerson becomes both the chilling and warm heart of the show.

Like others here, I have been surprised how well it holds up, with several of the episodes dealing with topics that are now current but were pretty much absurd at time of transmission.

Suggested this rewatch in the age of AI to my wife who was oblivious to it. Jonathan Nolan did a tremendous job with this. The concepts it showed were theoretical back in the old days. Now some are real. Some have passed. Like AI fixing code and closing loopholes. Like too much unchecked power in a few hands. Some have yet to come to pass. Like terrorists. Like crime neutralizing machines. Like misalignments. Like power limits. Like Rogue AI. Like self preserving AI. Like servants to an AI. Like God mode.

I randomly discovered this show a few years ago expecting a standard crime-sci-fi thriller but got sucked into a deeper dive about the implications of surveillance and AI. It might start off slower but the world building and the stakes develop well and it's remarkable to me how prescient it feels where the present feels closer to its reality than when it was released 15 years ago. I'm a little nervous about what it means for humanity as we get closer to that AGI-level world and deal with the inevitable problem of AGI alignment.

Person of Interest is a relentlessly silly show, although you wouldn't necessarily pick up on it at first. It leans into it more with each season until that's all there is. I still enjoyed it, it is pretty self aware. I would not watch it with the idea that it has any relevance to anything.

I am currently in the middle of binging this series in the evenings. At first I took the "high-episode-number, cookie cutter serial crime drama" as someone described here for granted. Like many others sometimes this is just what I crave to round off my day. Mindless somewhat violent unrealistic protagonists, crazy storylines... but about two seasons in, I noticed a remarkably deep plot about AI which is wonderfully apt in this day and age. The dialogues remain a bit comical, and the technical hacking details often make no sense, but it was an unexpected and very welcome layer to the story.

I started doing a rewatch a few weeks ago xD

Seeing it now the show also has some pretty fun foreshadowing of llm technology like an episode where they anticipate the idea of "ssd streaming" (running a model slower when you don't have enough memory to fit it all at once), at least this is how I interpreted it to make the connection.

And there are many others connections that now can be made thinking about llms vs the machine

Oh and they also anticipated the openai incident where models started using random stuff as external persistent memory across "sessions"

One of the best shows I ever seen. Criminally underrated. Always crosses my mind when someone mentions this phrase. Looking at the title, I was hoping it'd be about the show and surprisingly it is.

"This fucking show". Starts slow / procedural slop, but if stick through formulaic start, the payoff is not just a great show but candidate for personal greatest show if interest align. On the other hand, if AI bosses ever watched it (I surmise many did), it would explain all the Samaritan bootlicking.

Also Samaritan AI when.

Completed my third rewatch recent. The music really sells the emotion like no other. The combination of Finch, as the ultimate hacker, and Reese, as the soldier, is my vote for greatest fictional characters despite the existence of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

The two scenes that really stuck with me:

   1. When Finch is out playing hide and seek with the machine.
   2. When the machine is apologizing to Finch, telling him that it did its best.

I remember one scene that explains why the system cannot tell you anything beyond the identify of a person involved: the explanation was that there was system logic involved (e.g. a gas station stop correlating with a dead drop), but the creator encrypted the system. I always wondered why they didn't go with "it's a large machine learning model trained on a massive amount of data; it can stochastically alert you to heightened risk, but it can't tell you why, or judge who is victim and who is perpetrator".

I also started watching this for the first time this summer, and it holds up remarkably well

This is so crazy to see, as I've just recently started watching it as well (for the first time)

Why is this blog post written in two slightly different but semantically equivalent ways, with a tearline between the two versions?

I feel like I'm being A/B tested by a broken AI.

The show was a decade ahead of the world, starting out seemingly as a clone of The OG Equalizer, but which eventually became a war between two AGIs, one benevolent (although it absolutely did not start out that way), the other 100% EA-aligned longtermist before any of this was mainstream.

I enjoyed this show a lot and I was looking forward to westworld as a continuation of the story - I wanted to see what Nolan would do with the story when the AIs are corporeal, but ultimately westworld was a disappointment, spending too much of the story in the fantasy world.

I really liked this show. Ultimately it was very formulaic and could have done a lot more with the concepts it revealed. It painted a future where ai (along with total surveillance) could benefit people in deeply meaningful ways; matchmaker, fulfilling work and daily task, coordination, purpose and guidance. And the dangers of all those used for control.

It’s possibly the second best show involving Michael Emerson as a scientist turning against the controlling tech-cabal he once worked for, aided by a more lethal human companion and a very good dog.

(and it’s partly the same dog too)

This show is the epitome of “you have to watch a few seasons before it gets good”. (Which if you think about it is an absurd thing to tell someone. Ie Invest 24 hours of your time into this show before you decide)

When I watched it I thought the privacy model the AI used was dumb but it kind of makes some sense.

One of the most interesting details I've found to be are the scenes that show why AI system alignment is difficult

I don't what HN's opinion of Mr. Robot is, but some of you will definitely like it.

It's not really about hacking, but it depicted technology and hacking in an extraordinarily level of correctness.

looking at my apple social graph on my hdd as seen here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403097

Im feeing the premis of this show is not so far off..

Would I enjoy watching it for the first-time today? Or I should’ve watched it before, and re-watch it now to have this feeling/realization?

Loved that show when it came out. Rewatched it with my wife a few years ago, still great.

Rewatched a few times. Unfortunately, around the end seasons, it became predictable and “extended”. There are quite a few screens on their computer that were borrowed from unsuspecting sources — such as the screens from the App, DaisyDisk.

https://x.com/brajeshwar/status/1733390176112800037

Incredibly prescient show, I loved it at the time and it's definitely worthy of a rewatch soon.

> I also find it pretty crazy and, frankly, a little sad to think that something like the Machine, which seemed like pure science fiction at the time, isn't all that far from our reality today.

Yeah. "You are being watched. The govt. has a secret system - a machine - that spies on you every hour of every day". The opening words from the show's title sequence - Jumped straight to mind after the revelations of Microsoft building "a machine" for the IDF on Azure not so long ago.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...

great show, if you haven't watched it yet

It's one of those gems in the wild.

If there is a show that I can rewatch, it's this.

I am more interested in how the philosophy of the show, how the ethics tie into real world implications.

We talk about open source licenses in a grand manner which some might say " why does it matter" but this show shows how the philosophical decisions tie into overall ideas and what it can do.

Reese and Finch carried that entire show. The way their dynamic shifted over the first two seasons was easily the best part of the run lmao

You don’t want a free internet, you want a nice internet with nice people who can argue but don’t insult each other too harshly.

I still remember the weird shock I felt the first time I saw “kys” as a reply and looked it up. Something changed that day. Wasn’t even to me.

I watched the show in 2014 and it drove my interest to study and work in the AI sector (today I run an AI lab, whose name comes from that tv show).

I loved Westworld as well, which was the follow-up from POI. Most people don't like the later Westworld seasons but they are inevitable if you've seen what Nolan wanted to do with POI.

I think by far, it's the best TV show I've ever watched. At the time I saw it and thought "Huh, everything here is plausible. There's leaps, of course, but it's plausible."

Here is my review and explanation of the show, written in 2018: https://tildes.net/~tv/775/recommendation_person_of_interest...

Everything there was incredible.

Dark Angel

Fringe

LOST

Halt and Catch Fire

PoI

... And you're good...

[dead]

anybody else getting annoyed by DNS hijackers and wall-e gardeners who feel the need to edit shows you watched in the past with AI and DLSS?